Science —

Science tenure track: fewer women, but equal progress

A new study commissioned by Congress and carried out by the National Academies of Science takes a snapshot of how well women are faring in�academic�careers. The raw numbers show a striking disparity: in 2005, women received nearly 38 percent of the doctorate degrees in science and engineering, but only between six and 29 percent of associate and full professors in these fields were women. The report,�Gender Differences at Critical Transitions in the Careers of Science, Engineering, and Mathematics Faculty, took a look at how women are doing at key moments in their academic career progression in order to understand this disparity.

Its authors found that women are doing as well or better than their male counterparts at various stages in academic careers. Women are hired and granted tenure at a rate equal to, or slightly greater than, their male counterparts. While the acceptance and transition rates are comparable, however, women are still underrepresented at all levels due to the small number of women applying for these positions.

The study was limited to six disciplines—biology, chemistry, civil engineering, electrical engineering, mathematics and physics—and focused on 89 major research institutions across the United States. It consisted of a pair of surveys: one of the hiring and promotion practices of over 500 departments, and another that questioned over 1,800 individual professors about their careers.

One paradoxical finding in the data suggested that the more women that graduate with a PhD in a given field, the less likely they are to apply for a tenure-track position—in biology, 45 percent of the PhDs awarded went to women, yet they only accounted for 26 percent of the tenure track applications.

The study found that both sexes have comparable access to institutional resources such as start-up packages, travel funds, and grad students and postdocs to employ. Nevertheless, in all six fields, women were underrepresented at all three levels of the tenure track. On the positive side, those who were up for tenure were at least as likely to receive it as men.

As for salary, female full professors earned, on average, eight percent less than their male counterparts, but this difference disappeared at the assistant and associate professor levels.

The study also found that women spent longer as an assistant professor than men. This is possibly explained by the larger percentage of female professors who took advantage of what are termed 'stop-the-clock' policies. Since tenure review is often done a fixed number of years after one has been at a certain level, those who take time off to have or care for children would be negatively affected by the lost career time. 'Stop-the-clock' policies allow faculty to take time off to be with children or family without the time ticking away towards their tenure review. The report found that use of this policy did not change the percentage of those who receive tenure—it merely delayed tenure by approximately 18 months.

The report also looked at the factors that affect the gender composition of applicant pools, since this is where the differences apparently arise. It found that, when search committees were chaired by women or had a large number of women on them, a higher number of women would appear in the applicant pool.

Co-chair of the report committee, Sally Shaywitz, the Audrey G. Ratner Professor in Learning Development at Yale University School of Medicine, stated that "Overall the newly released data indicate important progress, and signal to both young men and especially to young women that what had been the status quo at research-intensive universities is changing."

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Matt Ford
Matt is a contributing writer at Ars Technica, focusing on physics, astronomy, chemistry, mathematics, and engineering. When he's not writing, he works on realtime models of large-scale engineering systems. Emailzeotherm@gmail.com//Twitter@zeotherm